Northeast Spain becomes a hotbed for US tech giants

With many American tech companies looking to expand their foothold across the world, a large number have planted their flag in Aragon, a diverse region of northeast Spain. While Aragon is one of Spain’s least-populated areas, its tech boom is quickly becoming consequential.

Why are tech companies flocking to Aragon?

Many American conglomerates are choosing to move there because of Aragon’s sparsity. The area is a “Big Tech company’s dream,” as “vast, uninterrupted stretches of the region are empty,” said Bloomberg. Aragon’s capital, Zaragoza, is Spain’s fourth-most populous city, but beyond that the “landscape opens out into broad countryside where most municipalities have fewer than 26 residents per square mile.” The excess land has made Aragon one of the “fastest-growing data center hubs, with investments announced by Amazon, Microsoft and others surpassing $94.4 billion.”

Amazon is one of the biggest investors and “promises to spend almost $40 billion to build multiple vast complexes — one alone as large as 600 American football fields,” said NPR. Amazon, and others like it, believe Aragon “could serve as a model for a European Union seeking to triple its data center capacity within seven years, and narrow the AI infrastructure gap with the U.S. and China,” said Reuters. Unlike other areas in Spain, Aragon’s government is also largely friendly to data centers.

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What does this mean for the region?

Many officials “speak boldly of the jobs and long-term prosperity that await once Aragon becomes ‘the Virginia of Europe,’” said Bloomberg, referring to Loudoun County, Virginia, which has the world’s highest concentration of data centers. The Aragon government “expects data centers to create tens of thousands of jobs and says local companies are already feeling the positive impact.”

Still, questions about long-term viability remain. Due to fears about the AI bubble bursting, some investors have “cast doubt on the billions of dollars that tech companies are pouring into infrastructure upgrades and partnerships with AI startups,” said The Wall Street Journal. The rapid buildup of tech has also “left many in Aragon feeling excluded from decisions that will profoundly impact their region and lives,” said NPR.

“We’re going to open the window and see nothing,” said Silvia Baselga, who lives near a data center construction site, to NPR. “It’s going to be like living beside a prison.”